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Thanks, and new plutoid
By Psyche | July 21, 2008
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Thanks again to those of you who responded to Friday’s post about Plutonica.net’s Amazon.com affiliation, your feedback and support is appreciated.
Readers, you may recall June’s announcement that Pluto had been reclassified from a “dwarf-planet” to a…”plutoid”, a status it shares with Eris, which gave rise to all this confusion in the first place. (Really.)
A third…non-planet (?) has been granted this dubious honour, and with it, receives a new name: Makemake.
Dimmer and smaller than Pluto, the new plutoid’s past appellations include 2005 FY9 and “Easterbunny”.
With utter disregard for the long tradition of naming planets (!) after Greco-Roman gods,1 Makemake is named after the Polynesian creator of humanity and god of fertility.
The Globe and Mail reports that Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, who discovered and named Makemake, said:
the name came to him when he was looking for a mythological god and thought of the South Pacific’s Easter Island. Makemake was the chief god among people who settled the island.
- The Globe and Mail, “Dwarf planet named for Polynesia god“
From “Easterbunny” to Easter Island? This is too cute, surly?
Astrologers, what do you make of it?
Footnotes:- Ok, yes, Pluto was technically named after a cartoon dog, but it still fits the pattern. [back]
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July 21st, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Sedna’s an Inuit sea goddess.
Quaoar’s a creator god of the Tongva- a tribe that used to live in the LA basin.
So it’s not just Makemake who’s non greco-roman.
depending on where they are or what sort of objects they resemble (i think oort cloud vs kuiper belt or something of the sort) they’re expected to be named after creator or underworld deities. i guess sedna counts as underworld, given that she lives at the bottom of the ocean….
i often find a lot of interesting musings here about the astrology of solar system oddities.
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Psyche reply on July 24th, 2008:
Thanks for the link, I especially like the section on Eris. It’s neat to see that tackled from an astrological perspective - it still seems to be omitted from most places I’ve seen online.
I’m just a little disappointed that major bodies aren’t being named in this tradition anymore. There are still many, many gods and goddesses available without planets. I’d even be ok with it if they wanted to name it after a Titan, or monster.
Next planet (or…”plutoid”) = Minotaur?
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July 21st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
oops, html got eaten i meant to point towards http://www.philipsedgwick.com for lots of detailed data on the weird goings on of the IAU from an astrological perspective.
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July 21st, 2008 at 10:50 pm
As the above mentioned, really it is only the Planets that were named after the Greco-Roman Gods. Asteroids, Meteors, and Planetoids are done differently, being named after gods, authors, whatever people wanted. I guess Dwarf Planets, and Plutoids may fall in that naming tradition.
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Psyche reply on July 24th, 2008:
I see it all as evidence of further degradation of Pluto planetary status.
If these “plutoids” are not dignified with the names Greco-Roman gods, but are named any random thing, reinforcing their arbitrary nature, there seems less chance of reinstating Pluto’s rightful status, somehow.
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Gesigewigus reply on July 24th, 2008:
Perhaps. I don’t know if it is just the circles I run in, but no astrologer I know has demoted Pluto* and most don’t use the Plutoids as anything other than a curiousity (partially because they are too new to know what they mean, heck even Pluto, Neptune and Uranus are considered too new to be understood well by some).
*I tried a quick google-fu, but there have been some interesting essays on the astrological importance of demoting Pluto. Pluto represents many of the things that Western society tries to repress and hide and shun, it’s death, it’s sex, it’s destruction, it’s pain…all things the greater culture tries to hide or subvert (turning sex into just something to sell), and we do the same with Pluto. We hide sex lives, we detach ourselves from death, we sweep it all under the rug, and we’re doing the same to Pluto.
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